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For a theory of nationalism
Christophe Jaffrelot
To cite this version:
Christophe Jaffrelot. For a theory of nationalism. 2003. �hal-01065058�
Questions de Recherche / Research in Question N° 10 – June 2003
For a theory of nationalism
Christophe Jaffrelot
Centre d'études et de recherches internationales Sciences Po
For a theory of nationalism
Christophe Jaffrelot CERI/CNRS
Abstract
Nation is state-oriented, whereas nationalism is an ideology which may simply promote one’s own identity against Others. Therefore, theories of nation-building do not explain nationalism. Other theories adopting a materialist approach do, like Gellner’s model in which nationalism appears as resulting from socio-ethnic conflicts, but they ignore the inner mechanism of this ideology. Theories looking at nationalism as an export product from the West also miss this point too. In contrast, a convincing body of theories anchor nationalism in socio-cultural reform. The intelligentsia which undertakes it in order to resist the threat posed by some dominant Other – often from the West, that fascinates them -, eventually develops a nationalist attitude, because it is not willing to imitate the West but strive to restore its culture by incorporating into it prestigious features of the West through the invention of a convenient Golden Age, the cornerstone of nationalism.
This approach finds a parallel in the theories of ethnicity which do not apply the primordialist paradigm but focus on the making of group boundaries. Barth highlights the decisive role of the relationship to the Other and the little importance of cultural contents – compared to the maintenance of group boundaries – in the making of ethnic identities, in such a way that there are more affinities between his theory of ethnicity and theories of nationalism than between the latter and theories of the nation.
However, one can construct an integrated model of nationalism by organising different theories in a sequence.
While the ideology-based approach comes first, the creation of a nationalist movement implies the rise of socio- economic conflicts and the massification of nationalism, a process of nation-building.
Résumé
La nation regarde vers l’Etat tandis que le nationalisme est une idéologie qui se contente parfois de promouvoir l’identité d’un groupe en relation avec d’autres. Les théories du nation-building n’expliquent donc pas le nationalisme. D’autres théories matérialistes y parviennent néanmoins, comme celle de Gellner où le nationalisme est le résultat de conflits socio-ethniques, mais où les ressorts internes de l’idéologie restent dans l’ombre. Les théories présentant le nationalisme comme un produit d’exportation d’origine occidentale ne font pas mieux, à la différence de celles qui l’ancrent dans un processus de réforme socio-culturelle. L’intelligentsia, qui a engagé ce processus pour résister à un Occident qui la fascine mais qu’elle perçoit comme une menace, développe finalement une attitude nationaliste car il n’a jamais été question pour elle d’imiter l’Occident mais de réhabiliter sa culture en y incorporant des traits prestigieux de l’Occident à travers l’invention d’un Age d’Or, la pierre de touche du nationalisme.
Cette approche trouve un parfait équivalent dans les théories de l’ethnicité, non pas celles qui appliquent le paradigme primordialiste, mais celles qui se concentrent sur la création des frontières entre groupes. Barth souligne à cet égard le rôle décisif de la relation à l’autre et le peu d’importance des contenus culturels – par rapport aux frontières des groupes – dans la formation des identités ethniques, à telle enseigne que sa théorie de l’ethnicité présente plus d’affinité avec certaines théories du nationalisme que celle-ci et les théories de la nation.
Toutefois, on peut construire un modèle intégré du nationalisme en organisant les différentes théories en séquence. Si les théories fondées sur le rôle de l’idéologie viennent ici en premier, la création d’un mouvement nationaliste implique l’exacerbation de conflits socio-ethniques et la massification du nationalisme, un processus de nation-building.
While, in France, nationalism has long remained the preserve of historians (Girardet, 1965; Nora, 1986) – before anthropologists1 (Dumont, 1983, 1991), sociologists (Schnapper, 1991) and political scientists (Michelat and Thomas, 1966; Delannoi & Taguieff, 1991, 2001;
Hermet, 1996; Birnbaum, 1997) began paying increasing attention to the issue –, American and English political scientists started early, soon after World War II. Since then, given the quickly expanding body of literature on nationalism in English, one may expect that this subject has given birth to a well-structured sub-discipline in the Anglo-Saxon political science.2
Certainly, the growing interest in nationalism among social scientists has been increasingly reflected over the last ten years in the multiplication of specialized journals and readers. Among the former, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge) was born in 1995 and National Identities (Basingstoke) in 1999, among the latter, one may mention, for instance, The Nationalism Reader (New Jersey, 1995) edited by Omar Dahbour and Micheline Ishay, Nationalism (Oxford, 2000) edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith and Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford, 1996), edited by Eley, Geoff, Suny and Girgor. There is now even an Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (Oxford, 2000), edited by Athena Leoussi and Anthony Smith. But has the theory of nationalism made much progress? In fact the very notion of a theory of nationalism seems to be problematic. Recently, Craig Calhoun came to the conclusion that:
Nationalism is too diverse to allow a single theory to explain it all. Much of the contents and specific orientation of various nationalisms is determined by historically distinct cultural traditions, the creative actions of leaders, and contingent situations within the international world order (Calhoun, 1997, 123).
Calhoun’s views echoed those of John Hall for whom ‘no single, universal theory of nationalism is possible. As the historical record is diverse, so too must be our concepts’
(Hall, 1999, p. 1). What is at stake here, is the very mission of social sciences, which are supposed to use, or build, concepts applicable to different contexts and situations (on this
1 Marcel Mauss, naturally, stands as an atypical pioneer since his article “La Nation” was written in 1920 (Mauss, 1953-54).
2 Pierre Birnbaum has noticed the contrast between the Anglo-Saxon scene and the French one: ‘In all haste, many are those who, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world that is more sensitive to the sociology of values, have undertaken research of all sorts: the production of studies on nationalism has replaced in the concerns of many research on corporatism or the state.
Actually, French sociologists, more deeply influenced by the Durkheimian or Marxist traditions, seem to remain on the sidelines, abandoning these forms of collective action, so difficult is it to fit nationalist values into structural logics that are hardly conducive to grasping variations in imaginaries.’ (Birnbaum, 1997, 2)
point, see also Stokes, 1978 and Waldron 1985). It is certainly high time to react to such regressive tendencies which would take us back to pre-analytical, typology-oriented forms of social sciences.
The rather pessimistic assessment of Calhoun and Hall partly results from the conceptual confusion that pervades this domain. Even though students of nationalism have made attempts at bringing order into an extremely prolific field (see A.D. Smith (1971) Richmond (1987) and Haas (1986)), this exercise has generally been undermined by a persisting incapacity to disentangle four key concepts, patriotism, nation, nationalism and ethnicity.
The notion of “patriotism” is much less heuristic than the three others. Most of the time, it is used in a morally-loaded perspective: patriotism is respectable because it refers to the defensive, heroic attitude of the nation under attack. Arjun Appadurai, in this very perspective, defines patriotism on the basis of the readiness of the citizens to die for their country (Appadurai, 1993), whereas “nationalism” precisely describes those engaged in aggressive, expansionist politics. But, asks Michael Ignatieff, “can you have patriotism without nationalism” (Ignatieff, 1999: 141)? Both are often the two sides of the same coin. In fact this dichotomy is as misleading as the one between civic, liberal nationalism on the one hand and ethnic, closed nationalism on the other hand – indeed, these two dichotomies to a great extent coincide.
The second definition of patriotism one finds in the specialized literature is closer to its etymological meaning: the word comes from “patria”, a term which refers to the “country of the father”, that is, historically the king. For many authors the notion of patriotism therefore marks the transition between the patria and the nation: it is still imbued with filial allegiance towards the king, but citizens now die for a more abstract social construct in which this sentiment is reinvested, such as those who fought in Valmy after the French Revolution. In this perspective, emphasizes C.A. Bayly, patriotism is equivalent to ‘Popular Proto- nationalism’ according to Eric Hobsbawm (Bayly, 1998, 100). For Bayly, however, this antecedent and anchorage point of nationalism that is patriotism refers more precisely to regional and community-oriented identities – he always qualifies patriotism as being plural and ‘old’: “patriotisms” are the cultural and historical material of which nationalism is made.
He qualifies them on the basis of ‘the specificities of the culture in which modern nationalism embedded itself’ (ibid., 109). In my own terminology, such a definition of patriotism harks back to the notion of ethnicity, on which I shall focus after examining the relation between nation and nationalism.
Too many comparative or even theoretical books insist on dealing with nation and nationalism simultaneously. However, to construct a theory of the nation and to evolve one of nationalism is not the same thing. Nations have an institutional dimension that is state- oriented – hence the notion of “nation-state” -, whereas nationalism is an ideology (an ‘ism’) which often claims the control of a nation and/or promotes one’s own (superior) identity against Others’. Its foundations, therefore, are rooted in identity politics and culture.
Therefore, I hypothesize in the following pages that there are more affinities between theories of nationalism and theories of ethnicity than between theories of the nation and theories of nationalism.3
The present essay does not only intend to clarify the relations between these three terms, nation, nationalism and ethnicity, but also to propose a framework for the understanding of nationalism that would integrate some of the most influential theories of nationalism in one model.
MODELS OF NATION-MAKING
The quest for models explaining the emergence of nations and nationalisms, constitutes a recent sub-discipline of political science. Until World War II, this subject had been monopolized by historians who were bent on tracing its characteristics by means of narrative and comparison or through purely descriptive typologies. From the 1950s, models making use of the tools employed by political sociology (such as statistics) found favor in the United States and Europe. In fact, political science first addressed the issue of nation- building, instead of that of nationalism, but both things were immediately bracketed together, causing an enduring confusion.
3 In fact, among the new journals on this area of interest we find also publications studying nationalism and ethnicity together, like Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (Portland), since 1995.
The ‘Nation-building’ school
State-making and nation-making
The first variant of the ‘nation-building’ school considers the effects of modernization from the very start of modern history, in the 16th century, in a macro socio-economic perspective. Its main representative, Stein Rokkan, subscribed to the framework of a
‘comparative macro-history of the territories of Western Europe’ (Rokkan, 1987, p. 75). His study of the emergence of the first European nation-states therefore depends on an analysis of the economic, territorial and cultural variables going back to the medieval period. The order in which they are enumerated here reflects the value he assigns to the material dimension of the modernization processes. The study of these variables was supposed to enable Rokkan to reconstitute the various stages in the formation of nations and explain their characteristics. The evolution of each of these three variables could be measured on the basis of specific data such as, for instance, for the 16th-18th centuries, the density of the network of commercial towns – especially along the axis formed by the Rhine and the Rhone-, and the administrative-military strength of the monarchical centers and their linguistic and religious homogeneity (Rokkan et alii, p. 23). This method of research involved collecting the greatest possible amount of statistical evidence; Rokkan was indeed a staunch advocate of statistics collection in political science (Merritt and Rokkan, 1966).
The major contribution made by these techniques of investigation lies undoubtedly in the construction of typologies and the identification of geo-economic and geopolitical cleavages that prepared the ground for the differentiation and crystallization of the first European nation-states (Rokkan, 1975, p. 592-595). However, this work deals very little with the concept of nationalism and scarcely with that of nation. The latter, perceived as being the result of a long term process, is seen only through the medium of the state and its institutional framework.
Charles Tilly, who belonged to the same intellectual milieu as Rokkan and worked in the same perspective, is very clear about the fact that ‘state-making’ is really what interests him. Although he studied nation-states, he warned from the outset of his book that ‘”nation”
remains one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon’ (Tilly, 1975, p. 6). His macro-history of Europe shows that state-building owes much to wars: before waging war because of nationalism, nation-states are indeed ‘made by wars’ simply because the cost of these wars oblige the kings to exact greater funds from their subjects and
therefore to develop a fiscal administration, in other words to territorialize their administration (Tilly, 1990). This process laid the ground for the making of nation-states, but Tilly’s approach does not claim to deal with nationalism per se.
More than three decades after Rokkan, Michael Hechter has proposed a theory of nationalism based on the stages of state-formation. According to Hechter, ‘nationalism consists of political activities that aim to make the boundaries of the nation – a culturally distinctive collectivity aspiring to self-governance – coterminous with those of the state’
(Hechter, 1999, p. 7). Therefore, nationalism is a by-product of the modern state. Pre- modern states ignored it because they were mainly in the form of empires whose governance units had frontiers including ‘culturally distinct groups’: this system of ‘indirect rule thwarts nationalism’ (ibid., p. 28). On the contrary, nationalism emerged when technical developments (in terms of communications, mainly) made direct rule possible. Hechter calls the first variety of nationalism that then crystallized ‘state-building nationalism’ because it is reflected in ‘efforts at cultural homogenization’ (ibid., p. 56). The other types of nationalism are reactions to direct rule: ‘peripheral nationalism’, sustained by groups resisting ‘state nationalism’, according to him, is the most prevalent one, then comes ‘irredentist nationalism’. Hechter’s theory suffers from several pitfalls. First, it does not explain the case of states which were centralized very early on, like China, and which have not given rise to nationalisms for centuries – until they were confronted with threatening Others, a variable absent from Hechter’s model. Second, there may be nationalisms which crystallize independently of the demand for self-determination, like those of diasporas which, sometimes, are not even territorialized. Third, the transition to direct rule has not systematically generated nationalisms (most of the peripheral provinces of France are illustrative of this process) and some nationalisms have developed in spite of indirect rule, in the federal framework for instance (because of social clashes or economic rivalries). State- making, therefore, is not the only variable to consider. In addition, Hechter totally ignores the ideological dimension of nationalism, but focuses all his attention on state-nationalism (that is, the making of the nation-state) or the political movement for self-determination.
The cybernetic variant
Rokkan’s study has in fact an equivalent in the cybernetic variant of the ‘nation- building’ school, whose central figure, Karl Deutsch, aspired to formulate a full-fledged model of nationalism, always giving priority to statistical data while concentrating on the
‘modernization’ associated with the technological revolutions of the industrial era – and no longer the 16th century.
In a pioneering piece of work done in 1953 (I refer to the 1969 reprint), Deutsch expressed his anxiety at undertaking a new study of nationalism which historians, mistakenly, according to him, classified as being a ‘simple “state of mind” with no tangible causes’ (Deutsch, 1969, p. 16). According to the ‘functional definition of nationality’ given by Deutsch, this latter ‘consists in the ability to communicate effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large groups more than with outsiders’ (ibid., p. 97). For Deutsch, this ability can be measured. As a result, the size of a nation and its cohesion are directly functions of the degree of advancement of this process. This can be evaluated by means of several indicators, such as the speed of urbanization, the level of the active population in the secondary and tertiary sectors, the number of newspaper readers, students, migrants, people connected by post... for all these are signs testifying to a degree of ‘social mobilization’, that is to say, to an integration into networks of communication that are denser than those of traditional societies. The analysis made by Deutsch is indeed built on the opposition between traditional and industrial societies, the transition from the former to the latter involving an increased ‘mobilization of society’.
When examining the model presented by Deutsch, Stein Rokkan regretted that
‘[u]seful time series for all these variables are obviously very hard to come by even for a single country’ (Rokkan, 1970, p. 67). In his view, there were not to be found in this theory any ‘easily identifiable generalizations for empirical testing across a broad range of nations.
Karl Deutsch's model is essentially heuristic: it suggests a priority in comparative data collection and then simply exhorts us to develop generalizations inductively through the processing of such materials’ (ibid., p. 51).
Besides this criticism from the inside, from a scholar sympathetic to Deutsch’s approach, the first major reservation that his model gives rise to, concerns his conviction that modernization will lead to the disappearance of ethnic peculiarities and the assimilation of minority groups into the dominant group: the members of the peripheral groups which participate in social mobilization are supposed to accept the cultural modes of the dominant group, even if only to take part in the division of labor practiced in the urban areas. In a later text, Deutsch even defines the stages through which this process of national construction is likely to take place:
Open or latent resistance to political amalgamation into a common national state; minimal integration to the point of passive compliance with the orders of such an amalgamated government; deeper political integration to the point of active support for such a common state but with continuing ethnic or cultural group cohesion and diversity; and, finally, the coincidence of political amalgamation and integration with the assimilation of all groups to a common language and culture - these could be the main stages on the way from tribes to nation [...] How long might it take for tribes or other ethnic groups in a developing country to pass through some such sequences of stages? We do not know, but European history offers at least a few suggestions. (Deutsch, 1963, p. 7-8).
The criticisms that this vision brings forth are mainly of two kinds: on the one hand, the author indulges in teleological ethnocentrism by assuming that such specific ethnic groups as aboriginal tribes must follow the same process of national integration as the nation states of Europe; on the other hand, some authors have shown that, instead of favoring national integration, ‘advances in communications and transportation tend also to increase the cultural awareness of the minorities by making their members more aware of the distinctions between themselves and others.’ (Connor, 1972, p. 329). Walker Connor cites the example of Thailand where ‘modernization’, by making some tribes more conscious of their specificity, has led to numerous separatist movements which developed a truly nationalist perspective.4 The proponents of ‘Nation-building’ have completely missed this point, not only because they have adopted a Europeanocentric and theological theory of modernization, but also because nationalism was not their object of study at all: their aim was to explain how nations take shape on the basis of technical developments. Theories of
‘nation-building’ are not theories of nationalism. The same remark applies to major aspects of the work by two scholars among the better known theoreticians of nationalism, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner.
Nationhood is not nationalism
Are ‘imagined communities’ nationalist?
The work done by Benedict Anderson - based largely on processes of communication like Deutsch’s – also addresses the issue of nation-building more than that of nationalism.
Anderson, too, tries to spell out a general theory of nations and nationalism, two phenomena which, according to him, emerged in modern times after a revolution in the field of values laid the ground for it. This revolution, according to him, found expression in: 1) the fading out of a
4 W. Connor also applies his reasoning to some countries of Europe such as Great Britain where minorities such as the Scots may have acquired a collective consciousness only from the time when modernization reached a critical threshold, endangering and simultaneously revealing their identity.
language of religion (such as Latin) known to promote access to the Truth, 2) the weakening of the idea according to which society is by nature organized around sovereigns having a divine status, 3) the abandoning of a ‘fatalistic’ and non-historical concept of time in which cosmology was not distinguished from the history of man.
These cultural fissures coincide with the development of the techniques of publishing and the emergence of capitalism in editorials, which was to have a considerable impact.
Novels and newspaper writing indeed involve the concept of an imagined community and a concept of time in which events get organized in accordance with a sequential, chronological logic. The reader finds himself placed in a specific period of time and within a certain society in which he observes characters playing their roles following a linear axis of time. Now, for Anderson, this is the very same situation in which man finds himself when studying his nation, which constitutes, in the same way, an abstract entity, whose criteria are the roots fixed in the past, the straining towards the future and the basic identity across time.
Furthermore, the development of the press gives the feeling of belonging to an ‘imagined community’ by arousing the same thoughts at the same time among members of a national culture whose borders are marked out on the basis of language:
The significance of this mass ceremony (...) [the fact of reading one's newspaper] is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet, each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically-clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? (ibid., p. 39).
This characterization of national sentiment as a mental fact underlying the development of the means of mass communication, can complement Deutsch’s cybernetic model in which little was said about the nature and the origin of a national consciousness.
But this aspect of Anderson’s theory remains more relevant for explaining an important element of nation-making, the feeling of forming a community - nationhood -, than for our understanding of nationalism as an ideology. In fact, Anderson does not say much about the content of nationalism, except that it is rooted in the past and relies on a linear as well as abstract conception of time.
Parallel to the impact of ‘print capitalism’, Anderson examines that of the administrative modus operandi in the European colonies, and especially in the Spanish American Empire. Once again, the starting point of the demonstration lies in the state-making process: in the administrative units of this Empire, the modern state eroded intra-regional cleavages by establishing not only ‘a standardized language-of-state’ (something that runs
parallel to the impact of ‘print-capitalism’), but also ‘human interchangeability’, in the sense that bureaucrats from different regions were posted, randomly, in regions they did not know before. This sequel of the ideal-typical Weberian rational state prepared the ground for the feelings of nationhood because these native administrators not only had become more alike and culturally homogeneous, but also meet in the capital where they came for bureaucratic
‘pilgrimages’. Such pilgrimages were not only responsible for fostering the solidarity and common culture of those who took part in them: they created a new cultural consciousness based on unprecedented feelings of otherness:
… on this cramped pilgrimage [the native bureaucrat] found travelling-companions, who came to sense that their fellowship was based not only on that pilgrimage’s particular stretch, but on the shared fatality of trans-Atlantic birth. Even if he was born within one week of his father’s migration, the accident of birth in the Americas consigned him to subordination – even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry, or manners he was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniard. There was nothing to be done about it: he was irremediably a creole (Anderson, 1983, pp. 58-59).
Anderson concludes that ‘pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role’ (ibid., p. 65) in the fragmentation of the Spanish-American Empire into 18 separate nation-states. This sudden development occurred in Latin America at a very early stage in the early 19th century, but it was reiterated subsequently along the same pattern up to the decolonization process that Anderson calls the ‘last wave’. In Indonesia, for instance, the spearhead of the nationalist movement again emerged from the intelligentsia. Education once again played a major role, not only because standardized textbooks shaped a new, ‘coherent universe of experience’, but also because the education system was also the crucible of a new social group: students of the tertiary education had to come to Batavia, to the Center and thus ‘the twentieth century colonial school-system brought into being pilgrimages which paralleled longer-established functionary journeys’, in which some of the students in question were bound to take part. They knew that ‘Rome was Batavia, and that all these journeyings derived “their” sense from the capital, in effect explaining why “we” are “here” “together”’ (ibid., p. 111). And they were there together as inlanders, which ‘meant that the persons referred to were both “inferior” and belonged there’
(ibid., p. 112).
Anderson’s model therefore combines two dimensions which are respectively epitomized by ‘print capitalism’ and the pilgrimages of the intelligentsia whose members really acquire a new, national consciousness in the class-room of a centralized, uniform education system and/or as bureaucrats. Anderson, by the way, often uses formulas like
‘national consciousness’ or ‘nation-ness’ (ibid., p. 123). However, he also, misleadingly, refers to the concept of nationalism to describe this new nationhood, be it in the expressions
‘colonial nationalisms’, ‘nationalist leaders’ or ‘nationalist intelligentsia’. The intelligentsia has
gained a new sense of belonging to a larger community called ‘nation’ but this feeling does not necessarily imply any demand for the control of the state or the promotion of one’s own identity against the Other. Surprisingly, Anderson does not elaborate on the impact of the superiority complex of the colonizers, in Indonesia or elsewhere, in terms of proto-nationalist resentment or indigenous cultural reforms, even though he emphasized that one of the important consequences of the exclusion of the natives by the colonial state was a collective resentment. For instance, the exclusion of the intelligentsia from the upper layers of the administration could only but have frustrated them in their aspiration for more power and laid the ground for the crystallization of nationalism.
The additions made by Anderson in the second edition of Imagined Communities addressed these flaws. He explains, in the preface, that after the publication of the first edition he had realized that what he ‘believed to be a significantly new contribution to thinking about nationalism – changing apprehensions of time – patently lacked its necessary coordinate: changing apprehensions of space’ (Anderson, 1991, pp. XIII-XIV). Hence the title of the new, tenth chapter of the second edition of the book, ‘Census, Map, Museum’ in which Anderson shows that in the 19th century, the European state attempted to control its domain by counting the people, mapping the world and recording the past. Populations were systematically classified and quantified, borders delimited countries or regions and the archaeological past was appropriated by the state which, partly to legitimize itself, takes an inventory of rehabilitated monuments which were ‘logoized’ as collective symbols on stamps or otherwise. This serialization process was also the key element of the state’s attempt , also in the overseas colonies, to establish a ‘totalizing classificatory grid’. For Anderson, this ‘style of imagining’ paved the way for nationalism because it ‘shaped the grammar which would in due course make possible “Burma” and “Burmese”, “Indonesia” and “Indonesians”’ (ibid., p.
185). Here the emphasis is mine because these two words characterize in a nutshell the main weakness of Anderson’s otherwise fascinating theory: it is not his intention to explain nationalism here; the study focuses on the preconditions likely to ‘make possible’ a sense of national belonging. Such an approach has strong affinities with what Michel Foucault called the effects of microphysics, these invisible practices of power which eventually created the modern subject (Verdery, 1993, p. 41). It is a case of nations without nationalists, not only because the processes described by Anderson are explicitly ‘unconscious’ – there is no actor – but also because there is no political ideology at stake.
Ernest Gellner, or the modernization theory as a remake
Ernest Gellner’s masterpiece, Nations and Nationalism, as suggested by its very title, reflects the pervasive confusion between theories of the nation and theories of nationalism.
In fact, the first facet of his model fits into the framework of the modernization theory à la Deutsch, what Gellner calls the ‘Transition’ from traditional societies to industrial societies.
The former, described as ‘agro-literate’ societies, witnessed a strict division between the categories of those who were literati and governed, and who, by reason of their power and their literacy, had access to a ‘great tradition’, and the mass of those who worked on the land and who bore just a ‘little tradition’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 9-12).5 Over and above the horizontal divide formed by this cultural dichotomy between the élite culture and the folk culture, there were many vertical ones in rural society that were particularly strong on account of the autarchic way of life in peasant communities: customs and dialects sometimes differed from one valley to the next. This cultural heterogeneity constituted the main obstacle to the formation of a nation according to Ernest Gellner.
The emergence of the industrial society goes on to promote cultural homogenization at the end of a long process inherent in the economic logic of this society: based on an evolutive technology and the idea of progress, it involves a permanent growth of productivity;
this results, for the working population, in the necessity for extreme professional mobility, hence a versatility which implies a solid generic training. Thus, ‘the level of literacy and technical competence, in a standardized medium, a common conceptual currency, which is required of members of this society, if they are to be properly employable and enjoy full and effective moral citizenship, is so high that it simply cannot be provided by the kin or local units, such as they are. It can only be provided by something resembling a modern “national”
educational system, a pyramid at whose base there are primary schools, staffed by teachers, led by the product of advanced graduate schools. Such a pyramid provides the criterion for the minimum size for a viable political unit’ (Gellner, 1983, p. 34).
5 A.D. Smith has challenged this view. He has criticized Gellner for taking into consideration, from among the ‘pre- modern’ agrarian societies, only the ‘aristocratic ethnic groups’ - such as the Indian caste society - in which, in truth, the culture at the apex hardly penetrates beyond the category of the lettered and those who govern. He underlines, by way of contrast, the existence in history of ‘demotic ethnic groups’ in which ‘a single ethnic culture permeates in varying degrees most stratas of the population, even if its base remains urban and outlying rural areas exhibit local variants of the culture.’ (Smith, 1986, p. 77). This cultural homogeneity arises out of the fact that these peoples consider themselves as ‘chosen’ in one way or another: ‘...in the more demotic types of ethnie the missionary and sacred aspect is part of their defining “essence”. Hence their ability to mobilize powerful sentiments of attachment and self-sacrificing action on behalf of the community. Hence, too, the often important role played by charismatic leaders and holy men who are felt to embody the unique characteristic of the whole community.’ (ibid., p. 83). The examples given by A.D. Smith to illustrate this type of ethnic group are notably the city-states and Amphyctions (Sumer, Phoenicia, Greece) and the tribal confederations (Turkish, Persian, Mongol).
The process of national construction thereafter progresses in accordance with the rate of the entry into the educational system of populations living more and more in outlying areas, which have understood that learning the dominant language and possessing a basic education are the prerequisites to their social ascent and their ability to defend their rights vis-à-vis the administration of the nation-state in the making. Beyond this, education confers a moral equilibrium by putting the people in step with the values of the society of which they are de facto members as ‘the limits of the culture within which they were educated are also those of the world within which they can morally and professionally, breathe. A man's education is by far his most precious investment, and in effect confers his identity on him’
(ibid., p. 36).
Cultural homogenization thus generates a new, national consciousness that Gellner calls ‘nationalism’. For him, ‘[n]ationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant, force though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state. It uses some of the pre-existent cultures, generally transforming them in the process, but it cannot possibly use them all. There are too many of them. A viable, higher culture, sustaining modern state cannot fall below a certain minimal size’, which is that required for the maintenance of an efficient educational system (ibid. p.
48).
What Gellner calls ‘nationalism’ here, in fact, is a new form of collective consciousness, the feeling of belonging to this innovation that is the nation-state. Such a sentiment does not necessarily imply any ideological, nationalist leanings. In fact, Gellner’s theory, so far, recalls that of the school of ‘nation-building’: once again, national integration is the main issue at stake and is seen as depending upon cultural homogenization in the context of socio-economic and state-led modernization. Hall applies a good test to the universality of Gellner’s theory when he points out that ‘it fails to explain the very first emergence of nationalism in eighteenth-century Britain and France’ by definition since in these two countries, ‘nationalist sentiments are clearly in place before the emergence of industry’ (Hall, 1993, p. 5). Indeed, this is an additional indication that Gellner is not interested in nationalism as an ideology, but in nation-making and nationhood. Thus, the theories reviewed up to now are theories of nation-making, or nationness-making, rather than theories of nationalism.
This criticism of Gellner by Smith has to be seen in the perspective of his interpretation of nationalism as having ethnic antecedents prior to the modern period (see infra.).
Rogers Brubaker has recently emphasized the difference between nationalism and other nation-related concepts like nationhood and nationness. Considering that ‘Nationalism can and should be understood without invoking “nations” as subtantial entities’ (Brubaker, 1997, p. 7), he insists that nations should not be seen as reified entities inherently incarnated in nationalisms. Hence his criticism of the ‘pervasive substantialist, realist cast of mind that attributes real, enduring existence to nations as collectivities…’ (ibid., p. 15). He brackets together Anderson and Gellner for adopting such a developmentalist approach of the nation, which suggests that it is something that grew and then ‘exists’ in a stabilized manner. For Brubaker, the nation is a ‘category of practice’, not a ‘category of analysis’. The real categories of analysis are ‘nationhood’ or ‘nationness’, two notions which designate, each of them, ‘a variable property of groups’ and ‘something that happens’ (ibid., pp. 18-19), not something that develops. While Brubaker dwells on these two concepts in order to contrast them with that of ‘nation’, he does not elaborate much on the nationalism issue. He simply emphasizes that ‘the analytical task at hand […] is to think about nationalism without nations’
(ibid., p. 21) and that ‘Nationalism is not engendered by nations. It is produced – or better, it is induced – by political fields of particular kinds’ (ibid., p. 17). But he adds in a footnote, ‘Not only political fields but economic and cultural fields too can generate nationalism’ (ibid.).
Such statements are thoroughly confusing. What remains is the need to de-link the notion of nationalism and that of nation, an excellent preliminary step for a correct understanding of nationalism as an ideology, something that most of the authors reviewed so far have missed, except Gellner to a certain extent.
GROUP RIVALRIES AS FERMENTS OF NATIONALISM
Socio-ethnic conflicts and the emergence of nationalism
Gellner has evolved a theory of nationalism, in addition of that of the nation that we have analyzed above. If the minimal size of a nation is defined by him as the minimal scale of an efficient educational apparatus, its maximal size is a function of the role of the “cultures”
pre-existing the nation-making process – to use his own terms. Ernest Gellner explains this in Nations and Nationalism by calling to mind the manner in which race or religion (less
interchangeable than language), can serve as the basis for the self-transformation of an
‘inferior culture’ into a ‘superior culture’ within the framework of socio-ethnic conflicts. This second facet of Gellner’s model was, however, to be found in a more sophisticated form in Thought and change, written twenty years earlier, and in which the analysis of the processes of cultural homogenization was, a contrario, less developed.
We already know that Gellner regarded material interest as being one of the motivations for entry into the educational system which gives rise to the nation; this type of incentive becomes central for explaining the maximal size of nations to the extent to which it explains secessionist nationalisms by the fact that ‘sometimes, [...] it seems or is advantageous to set up a rival “nation” of one's own instead.’ (Gellner, 1964, p. 165). Here, he considers the case of an unequal distribution of economic resources across the territory of a state. A people, ‘B’, originating from a deprived region, goes on to migrate towards the more developed zones where an ethnic group, ‘A’, anxious to conserve the monopoly of its privileged situation, exercises discrimination towards ‘B’, putting forward as a pretext its racial or cultural inferiority. The members of ‘B’ - who have migrated or remained in their region - find themselves in a problematic situation:
... their discontent can find ‘national’ expression: the privileged are manifestly different from themselves, even if the shared ‘nationality’ of the under-privileged men from B starts off from a purely negative trait, i.
e. shared exclusion from privilege and from the ‘nation’ of the privileged. Moreover, the men from B now do have leaders: their small intellectual class probably cannot easily pass into A, and even if they can, it now has an enormous incentive not to do so; if it succeeds in detaching B-land, by the rules of the new national game, in which intellectuals are not substitutable across frontiers, it will have a virtual monopoly of the desirable posts in the newly independent B-land (ibid., p. 167).
For Gellner, it is in these situations that ‘culture, pigmentation, etc., become important: they provide means of exclusion for the benefit of the privileged, and a means of identification, etc., for the underprivileged [...] Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist - but it does need some pre- existing differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, they are purely negative.’
(ibid., p. 168).
Gellner argues that ‘an intelligentsia and a proletariat is required for an effective national movement’ (ibid., p. 169). Specifying that this proletariat may recruit its members from peasant circles, he does not spell out its status in detail while he carefully describes the intelligentsia as being ‘a phenomenon essentially connected with the transition. [from the traditional societies to the industrial era] [...] a class which is alienated from its own society by the very fact of its education’ (ibid., pp.169-170). Most probably, in Gellner’s model, the intelligentsia of ‘B’ would be responsible for shaping the nationalist ideology of this group.
But he does not give any detail about this ideology-making process: Gellner is not interested in ideas; he focuses on socio-economic processes which are epitomized, here, by a social group, the intelligentsia.6
The analysis of nationalism in terms of conflicts in which socio-economic and cultural or ethnic cleavages are superimposed, actually underlies a number of theories inspired by Marxism or the instrumentalist paradigm.
The Marxist debate
As mentioned by Tom Nairn, ‘The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure’ (Nairn, 1981, p. 329). The traditional Marxist approach to nationalism, from an international relations perspective, described this political phenomenon in terms of the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism. These two ‘isms’ reflected the action of capitalist classes or of native bourgeoisies pursuing their own economic interest under cover of a basically instrumental national ideology. This widespread version, first found in a formal manner in the writings of Lenin and the debates involving Rosa Luxembourg and Otto Bauer, has been the source that in particular nurtured Peter Worsley’s work (1964) during the 1960s (for a history of the Marxist ideas about nationalism, see H. Davis (1978) and Connor (1984).
More recently, some Marxist writers, noting how wrong their predecessors had been in underestimating nationalistic phenomena by focusing too exclusively on the fate of the social classes, have undertaken to reframe the theory. Marxist authors involved in action supported the thesis of a fundamental identity between oppressed classes and nations (Blaut, 1987). Such an interpretation of nationalism is congruent to Gellner’s approach since it applies the same socio-economic rationale to nationalism as class struggle does. More
6 Adopting a similar perspective, Dov Ronen connects in a relatively innovative manner the notion of ethnic conflicts to the diffusionist paradigm. He assumes that, the idea that self-determination having ‘extended across the world’ (Ronen, 1979, p. 17) since the French Revolution, all individuals aspire to lead their lives and pursue their interests freely. When this quest is hampered in one way or another, groups crystallize to eliminate the obstacle. The nature of the group that gets constituted in this manner and the nature of its action vary in accordance with the characteristics of the oppression felt: the French Revolution, the 19th-century nationalities movement, the struggle of the Marxist classes, anti-colonialism and the movements of minorities are all manifestations of the same phenomenon. In each case, a group consciousness emerges as a reaction to domination or to external aggression, as can be witnessed in the case of ethnic communities: ‘Human beings speaking a certain language, guided by similar values, and relating to an historical past have always existed, but only when threatening neighbors or rulers, who may not speak the same language or relate to the same historical past, are perceived as “them” or ‘others”, is an “us” born’ (ibid., p. 8). Like Gellner, however, Ronen does not say anything about the transformation of this ‘us-feeling’ into nationalism as an ideology.
generally speaking, the Marxist re-examination of the problem often ties in with the materialistic dimension of the model presented by Gellner, from whose work Nairn, Balibar and Wallerstein, moreover, quote liberally (Nairn, 1981, p. 338 and 343; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988, p. 69), particularly for his analysis of unequal economic development in a given territory.
However, their analysis remains excessively simplifying and not so different from the old, orthodox ones. For Nairn, who focuses on nationalist movements in Great Britain, the capitalist ‘world political economy’ being responsible for ‘uneven development’ (Nairn, 1981, p. 335) between countries as well as within the Center of the international system, it was necessary to defuse the protest and the coming together of peripheral groups: nationalism, therefore, acquired ‘a functionality in modern development’ since ‘the “solution” lies in the crudity, the emotionalism, the vulgar populism, the highly colored romanticism of most nationalist ideology’ (Nairn, 1981, p. 354). The argument developed by Balibar and Wallerstein runs parallel to Nairn’s:
National units get constituted from the starting point of the global structure of the world economy, depending on the role that they played at a given period, while starting with the center. Better: they get constituted pitted against each other as instruments competing for the domination of the center over the periphery. This first clarification is a basic one because it substitutes a ‘historical capitalism’ in which the early phenomena of imperialism and the association of wars with colonization play a decisive role, for the
‘ideal’ capitalism of Marx and particularly of Marxist economists (Balibar and Wallenstein, 1988, p. 121).
This unfortunately little-developed input of Marxist writers drawing their inspiration from Gellner as well as from Braudel, in the rest of the book remains somewhat tinged with reductionism to such an extent that nationalism is often seen only as the ideological tool of dominant states, meant to consolidate the unity of their population (ibid., p. 129) and to fortify their control over it (ibid., p. 111). Nations are eventually described as strategic productions of dominant states which find themselves organized within a world order: ‘Inequalities which are significant and clear without for all that being immutable are precisely the kind of processes which lead to ideologies capable of justifying a worthy position in the hierarchy, as also of questioning a poor one. It is these ideologies that are considered nationalistic’ (ibid.).
By dint of reducing ideology to the rank of a simple justification for domination on a macro-social level, we arrive at debatable formulas that have not been sufficiently argued out. This is how racism is analyzed as ‘the magic formula promoting the realization of capitalist (...) objectives’ (ibid., p. 48) in the form of the maintenance of an under-paid work force and social peace to the extent to which it enjoins the idea of an inferiority of the races from which workers are recruited.
The reflections of writers who look at ethnic conflicts in relation to power, sometimes in an instrumentalist perspective, often prove to be more stimulating.
Power conflicts, instrumentalism and nationalism
Another conflict-related theory of nationalism highlights the role of political oppositions in the genesis of this ‘ism’. It is best represented by the masterly synthesis of the historian John Breuilly, whose chronological framework takes us back - as does that of Stein Rokkan - to the 16th century, when truly structured states emerged. The birth of the first nations of Western Europe is in fact analyzed by Breuilly as resulting mainly from the superimposition of the political and religious oppositions of the Protestant countries of the North towards the monarchies of the South (Breuilly, 1982, p. 46-47). Similarly, the movement for national unity in Italy, Germany and Poland in the 19th century is described as stemming from the political opposition of the elite classes forced to part with their prerogatives or deprived of power by ‘multinational states’ (ibid., p. 88-89). The same reasoning is applied to the nationalities movement of Central Europe, born at the time when the Hapsburg Empire was changing from a feudal structure to a centralized form (ibid., p.
112-113). Anti-colonial nationalisms also, in their own way, constitute an ‘attempt to capture State power’ (ibid., p. 137). The author summarizes as follows his general line of argument:
…nationalism should be understood as a form of politics and […] that form of politics makes sense only in terms of the particular political context and objectives of nationalism. Central to an understanding of that context and those objectives is the modern state. The modern state both shapes nationalist politics and provides that politics with its major objective, namely possession of the state (ibid., p. 352).
From this perspective, the nationalist ideology is almost nothing more than a dressing, the mask of the political aspirations of those who support it. Breuilly finds three functions particularly assigned to it: the coordination of the different sections (social, economic, religious, etc.) of political opposition, the mobilization of fringe groups often emanating from the ‘people’ and the legitimization of nationalist views with relation to an international environment dominated by the ideals of universalistic liberalism (ibid., p. 324 and p. 366-367).
This model of nationalism is undoubtedly, after that of Gellner, the most complete of those that are listed among the conflict-related theories. Its weakness, in contrast to the large
majority of the latter theories, lies in the marginal role that it attributes to socio-economic considerations. While laying stress on the conflicts between the elite classes from an even more overtly instrumentalist point of view, Paul Brass, for his part, tries to integrate the socio- economic with the political dimensions of the problem. Brass is a clear proponent of the instrumentalist approach which ‘emphasizes the uses to which cultural symbols are put by élites seeking instrumental advantage for themselves or the groups they claim to represent’
(Brass, 1979, p. 69). He argues that in any multi-ethnic state, nationalist conflicts are exacerbated from different angles: 1) the control over the state - and over its resources - give rise to competition between ethnic élites, 2) the State discriminates inevitably between the ethnic groups comprised within its borders and 3) it endangers the existence of the élites of the peripheral ethnic groups by its will to centralize; the ethnic élites stay away from power go on to create nationalist movements to sustain their struggle for power:
Clearly, both types of conflicts – for control at the center and for control over local territories and communities – take on an added significance when élites in competition are from different ethnic groups and/or use different languages. The ability to mobilize large numbers of people around symbols and values with a high emotional potential is a major, though unstable, resource that can be brought into the fray against the controllers of bureaucratic apparatuses, instruments of violence and land (Brass, 1985, p. 28).
It is during this process of mobilization of the masses by the élite by means of cultural symbols that nationalist identities get formed; this formation process is, moreover, an on- going process since the changing circumstances in which the strategy of the elite unfurls involve adaptation to new demands and to new alliances. This malleability of national identities has naturally become a subject of debate, as we shall see while examining the views of the primordialists.
The theories reviewed in this section pay more attention to nationalism than those reviewed in the previous one, which focused mainly on the nation-state. Yet, they do not make much room for ideas, precisely because they still share with theories of the nation a strong emphasis on material processes. Indeed, they stress the role of élite conflicts and inter-élite competition for capturing the state and/or economic resources in the crystallization of nationalism. Such an approach is clearly reductionist and misleading. Connor has shown, in a very systematic analysis, that nationalist movements can appear independently of any economic discrimination: have not the Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the Sikhs in India, the Croatians and the Slovenes in former Yugoslavia enjoyed from this point of view, a privileged situation (1984, p. 4)? He underlines in addition that wherever there is no ethnic cleavage, economic inequalities between communities such as that of Maine and other American states do not give rise to conflicts as would have been expected. Finally, ethnic conflicts do not die out once economic differences have been leveled out: that is the lesson
to be learnt from the Flemish and Slovak separatist movements which persist despite the successful effort made by the authorities in favor of these regions.
If conflict-related theories of nationalism overemphasize material processes, I would argue that they are nevertheless exploring a most promising hypothesis when they postulate that nationalism results from rivalries and competition. Their mistake, simply, consists in focusing on such rivalries and competition in the sole realms of politics and economics. In fact, the dimension of cultural and even psychological domination and competition play a major role in the development of nationalism. This ‘ism’ has usually been constructed as an ideology by the intelligentsia precisely because of these influences.
NATIONALISM AS AN IDEOLOGICAL RESPONSE
Nationalism has hardly appeared to us, till now, as possessing the traits of an ideological force - when it did don this characteristic, it was, at best, as the result of, or the justification for, ‘material’ processes. It is high time to turn to the ideology-centered theories.
They can be divided into two categories: those that analyze nationalism as a construction in reaction of some cultural domination and those that see in it a phenomenon of intellectual diffusionism. Their basic common point lies in a rehabilitation of ideas7 either as the product of ideological reinterpretations or - in the case of the diffusionists - as agents of history. But the diffusionists are much less convincing, especially when they indulge in functionalist developments.
Diffusionism and functionalism
Historians are certainly the social scientists who most often expound a diffusionist approach to nationalism. Hans Kohn thus retraces the spread of nationalism throughout the world in this perspective: born in the 17th century in England, the ‘English ideas of personal
liberty and national organization became known abroad through the intermediary of French thinkers, and were absorbed and transformed into the general consciousness of the 18th century’ (Kohn, 1955, p. 19). The French Revolution drew inspiration from it before its heir, Napoleon, served again as a relay: ‘What these [European] peoples – Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Russians -, did not learn from the French Revolution – the spirit of 1789 hardly touched them – they learned from Napoleon: nationalism, not as a vehicle of individual liberty but as adoration of collective power’ (ibid., p. 29). The colonies were the last stage of this diffusion of nationalism: ‘Asia judged herself by this new ideal, she absorbed it, learned and was transformed under its guidance’ (Kohn, 1929, p. 90).
This pure diffusionist concept does not say why the imitation of the learners concerns nationalism rather than any other ideology born in Europe, nor whether it is a conscious undertaking, or how such an alien influence destroys and rebuilds allegiance to a political community. The obvious mistake of the diffusionists lies in their assumption that societies receiving ‘influences’ from the outside can absorb them as if they were a tabula rasa. Now, it is well-known that no element of ideological discourse available on the international market can be transplanted to new societal context without fundamental changes and without responding to deep incentives.
In order to offset these inadequacies, some historians, and some political scientists in their wake, have tried to make the diffusionist postulate revolve around a functionalist paradigm. But functionalism is also intellectually fallacious. Its main flaws reside in the fact that it takes ‘the expression of a societal need as a reason for the existence of institutions that seek to look after it’ (Hall, 1993, p. 4). In this perspective, for the diffusionists-cum- functionalists, each wave of expansion of nationalism corresponds to circumstances of restructuring of societies, which gives rise to a ‘need for belonging’, nationalism being a response to this. Boyd Shafer applies this reasoning to the post-revolutionary phase of the years 1789-1815 (Shafer, 1964, p. 131) and to the crisis of the inter-war period:
Th[e] old rural and agricultural society, while disintegrating, dragged along with it during its fall, its loyalties and its traditions. When men found themselves plunged into the urban and industrial life, they were deprived of their earlier status without finding security (...) Nation and nationalism supplied new gods, new hopes, a means to achieve a good life, at a time of instability, a time when (perhaps more than at any other time) men felt oppressed and ill-adapted to their environment (ibid., p. 162-3).
Once again, the problem we face here concerns the confusion between ‘nation’ and
‘nationalism’. Nations are presented as a response to the instinctive ‘need to belong’ of man – a proposition we shall discuss below – and nationalism is not discussed as an ideology at
7 For an overview of nationalism in the history of ideas, see O. Dahbour and M. R. Ishay, 1995.
all. This is precisely what Elie Kedourie does, while still combining functionalism and diffusionism. The founding values of nationalism, self-determination (rights and duties of the individual) being the foremost, were, in his view, introduced by Kant and then personified for the first time in a nationalist movement through the German Youth group which drew its inspiration from Fichte. The German Youth movement took hold of this ideology because the younger generation was subjected to a recasting of values and social structures at the origin of a search for psychological security. Kedourie’s theory of nationalism is primarily functionalist: nationalism developed on the foundation of Kantian ideas because it met the
‘need to belong’ of a specific community. The writer establishes, at this stage, a general law according to which the destruction of traditional social structures engenders ‘an atomized society which seeks in nationalism a substitute for the old order, now irrevocably lost’
(Kedourie, 1971, p. 112). This pattern is functionalist insofar as the writer says that the nation
‘satisfies a need’, ‘that of belonging to a community both coherent and stable’ (ibid., p. 101).
Its diffusionist dimension is to be found in the idea that people living overseas import the nationalist ideology from the West to compensate their subjection, with colonization, to the impact of the Modern State: ‘European administrative methods in particular, centralized, impersonal, uniform, undiscriminating in their incidence, had a leveling and pulverizing effect on the traditional hierarchies and loyalties, traditional ties of dependence which, however capricious and oppressive in their general effects, did yet have about them a warm and personal quality which made power seem approachable and comprehensible to the humblest and most insignificant man’ (Kedourie, 1970, p. 23).
The agents of the introduction of nationalism are those who appear the most exposed to cultural splits: the members of the intelligentsia who hold their marginal position as a result of the acquisition of ‘modern’ knowledge in an ‘outdated’ society which they can hardly fit into, all the more so as few professional outlets are offered to them. However, even in the extreme case of an intelligentsia that is alienated and a prey to deep psychological disturbance, Kedourie seems to set too much store by the power of the ‘need to belong’, for we may well wonder why this need makes itself felt on the nation rather than on a more familiar entity.8 And once again what is at stake is more the nation as a collective body than nationalism as an ideology, though Kedourie deliberately refers to the diffusion of ideas.9
8 The work of Hroch displays similar weaknesses. He argues that ‘nationalism is a substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating society. When society fails, the nation appears as the ultimate guarantee’ (quoted by Guibernau, whose functionalism is even more mechanistic: ‘Nationalism, she argues, appears as a reaction to two intrinsic constituents of modernity that are closely linked to globalization: radical doubt and fragmentation […] In a world of doubt and fragmentation, tradition acquires new importance’ (Guibernau, 1996, p. 133).
9 Another stumbling block is the tendency towards teleological reasoning among all historians or theoreticians subscribing to this approach. Louis Snyder lays greater stress on the need for security as being at the origin of the
‘need to belong’ (Snyder, 1976, p. 163), but always couples together diffusionist and other functionalist
In contrast to these mechanistic concepts, political scientists well-versed in the study of social phenomena look at the diffusion of ideas into the framework of receiver societies. It is consequently a matter of analyzing how this impact sets into motion a process of ideological creation through the recasting of sometimes very well stated and rich indigenous cultures. This perspective proves to be particularly convincing also because it can incorporate elements of the conflict-based theories.
Nationalism and socio-cultural reform
The theory of nationalism presenting this phenomenon as the result from socio- cultural reform fills the gaps left by the two groups of theories of nationalism we have reviewed so far. Those based on socio-economic and political conflicts opened a promising perspective but did not pay enough attention to symbols and ideas; those based on diffusionist and functionalist premises paid attention to ideas but explained their export from the West and import elsewhere in the world in an overly simplistic and mechanical manner.
The theory now under review is more relevant because it assumes that, while nationalism comes from outside, it is not imported but shaped by the intelligentsia of societies submitted to some domination, not only economic and political but primarily cultural and symbolic.
Nationalism, therefore, stems from competition, but on the immaterial, psychological ground first, and must be seen as an indigenous creation.
This approach was first encapsulated in a full-fledged model by Anthony Smith in the early 1970s. At the base of his theory lies the impact of the modern concept of the ‘Scientific State’ which is defined by the will to ‘homogenize the population within its boundaries for administrative purposes’ (Smith, 1971, p. 231). The future intelligentsia receiving a Western education in the framework of the Scientific State and after a traditional socialization process, finds itself in an ambivalent situation. Three attitudes are possible in the face of this psychological difficulty:
reasonings: ‘Nationalism came to the peoples of Africa and Asia through a combination of what the anthropologists call parallelism and diffusion in culture. On the one hand, the new nationalism arose parallel to European developments as a psychological need. In this sense it was an independent phenomenon. On the other hand, many of its forms, techniques and symbols were diffused from London, Paris, Rome, and New York along routes travelled by African and Asian students’ (ibid., p. 113). Other historians adopt a purely functionalist reasoning, describing nationalism as ‘a substitute for, or supplement to, historic, supranatural religion’ (Hayes, 1960, p. 176).
